Tell Me a Secret

by Jane Fallon

  The show we all work on is a three-times-weekly early-evening soap. Or ‘continuing series’ as the channel would prefer it to be known. Churchill Road. Set around a fictional school on a fictional estate in west London, it appeals mainly to teenagers and students. It’s a machine cranking out episodes week in, week out, with an insatiable appetite for new stories. However outlandish.

  Juliet is sitting at her desk opposite Joe, fair straw-like hair hanging over a script, pen tapping against her teeth in a way that once had Roz shout ‘Will you fucking stop doing that?’ so loudly that someone from the accounts department down the hall came running in to see if a fight had broken out. Juliet had looked up and said, ‘Just Roz being her usual melodramatic self,’ and turned back to the document she was reading, pen poised. Tap tap tap. We decided she does it to annoy us.

  I scoff. ‘Of course not. Because that would involve her trying to look pleased for me. And we all know she’d never pull that off.’

  ‘Glen must have told her she hadn’t got it, just before he gathered everyone round. Did you see how quickly she got out of there?’

  ‘Fuck. She must properly hate me now.’ I watch her, focused on her reading.

  Roz laughs. ‘She hated you already. I wouldn’t worry about it.’ She flops into the little armchair in front of the desk. ‘I might just sit here all day. I could do my work from here, right?’

  I raise a cynical eyebrow at her and she laughs. ‘It’s gone to your head already.’

  She helps me stack my piles of scripts and notebooks on the shelves and then leaves me to it. I finish putting my few bits and pieces in the desk drawers and sit down behind my desk. Now what?

  I try to remember what Marcus, my predecessor, used to do all day. Basically a lot of nosying into what the rest of us were up to in so far as I can remember. Along with mapping out the storylines for the months ahead. I decide that the best use of my time is to get up to speed with everyone else’s episodes. So I send a (what I hope is jovial and not too dictatorial) email to Roz, Joe and Juliet asking them to send me copies of any drafts they’re currently working on.

  I get a thumbs up through the glass from Joe and a few minutes later he drops a freshly printed script on my desk with the promise that the rest will follow shortly. I start to work my way through it, glad to have something to do. By the time I get to the end I realize I haven’t taken anything in. I take a few deep breaths to calm myself down and start again, making notes as I go along. I don’t know why I’m feeling so stupidly nervous. I got this promotion because I deserve it. I say that to myself over and over in my head like a mantra.

  By the time I’ve worked my way through Joe’s episodes there’s still nothing from either of the other two so I occupy myself making towers of out-of-date paperwork to shred. At three minutes to six there’s a ping to say I have a new email and there’s a message from Roz: no note, just twelve attachments. That’s something, at least. I look up at her and wave my thanks. I send them off to print. I can look at them first thing Monday. Even I’m not keen enough to lug them home with me.

  By five past most people have started to drift off. I pull my coat on wondering if I should be making an effort to stay later. Or would that make everyone else think I was judging them if they left on time? Would they all feel they had to stay later too, and then so would I, and we’d end up all being here till midnight? It’s a minefield.

  Roz is still at her desk when I walk past.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’ I say. It’s usually the other way round. Roz loves a quick one at the end of a working day, the chance to analyse our co-workers. Usually that just involves us both moaning about what a bitch Juliet is or Roz complaining that Emma (who I think is quite sweet, but Roz thinks is wet) does her head in with her mimsiness.

  ‘Can’t tonight either,’ she says, pulling a disappointed face. ‘I promised Hugh a takeaway on the sofa. How was your first day?’

  ‘Weird.’ I dig through my bag for my Oyster card. I call across the room, ‘Juliet, you’ll send me all your episodes, won’t you? I need to get up to speed.’

  She peers up at me, reading glasses perched precariously on the end of her nose. ‘When I get a moment to sort them out. Is there a rush?’

  ‘Not really. Thanks.’ I turn back to Roz. ‘At least I have yours to keep me going.’

  When I applied for the script executive job I told Roz and Joe because I wanted to be sure they’d support me if I got it. Joe had only recently joined us, having decided to make the move from theatre to TV, so I knew he wouldn’t be applying himself, and Roz has always made it very clear she has zero interest in trying to move up the ladder. She has a problem with authority even if that authority is her.

  ‘I’d have to hate myself, how would that work?’ she’d said when I asked her and I’d nearly choked on the Snickers bar I was eating, laughing. We knew that Juliet was hoping she might be the lucky one. She’d been there the longest of the two of us, since the show’s beginning five years ago. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine she might think the job was hers for the taking.

  I sought Roz’s advice constantly while I was filling in the application, trying out my responses on her.

  ‘Fucking hell, you sound as if you’re applying to become a hooker,’ she’d said when I’d read her my answer to the question ‘How do you feel you could bring out the best in others?’, which was something along the lines of ‘I believe I am skilled in making people feel relaxed and easing tension in stressful situations.’

  Part of the form was to pitch an original storyline that could stretch for ten episodes or more, which seemed a bit ridiculous seeing as Glen had heard most of my ideas many times, but I suppose was there to give him a clearer picture of any external candidates’ skills. Because the job had to be advertised in the big wide world, obviously, it was never going to be as straightforward as a choice between me and Juliet. Roz critiqued all my ideas for me, pushing me to think about them harder, guiding me to choose the one that would best stand out. I was drawn towards an idea I’d had bubbling around in my head for a while about our over-achiever sixth-former character Morgan failing her exams and having a breakdown. It was barely more than a few beats strung together, but I thought at least it was something different, and Morgan’s character has become quite boring and predictable. Roz persuaded me that a more conventional – but more fully developed – strand about a teacher/student relationship might come across better.

  ‘It’s sexier,’ she said. ‘And that’s all they care about, after all. It’d get ratings.’

  ‘Do you think?’ I said, pushing my baked potato lunch round with my fork. We were in the greasy spoon just along the road from the office. ‘It’s just a bit … obvious.’

  ‘Who cares?’ She speared a bit of tomato. ‘When did that ever matter on this show?’

  ‘You might be right,’ I said. The show has been on for five years and pretty much everyone has slept with everyone else by this point. Everyone is everyone else’s father/mother/long-lost sibling. The audiences lap it up.

  Roz had smiled. ‘I’m always right.’

  And in retrospect she was. Like I said, I couldn’t have done it without her.

  3

  My celebration with Dee turns into a ‘let’s clear out Ashley’s room’ intervention. But with added alcohol. Dee is an organizer. She can’t stand to watch people faffing around, unable to make a decision. I’ve seen her march up to someone at a shop counter before and tell them the blue suits them much better, the grey would make their eyes look washed out, now if they could just pay and move on we’ll all be happy. It usually works too. It’s amazing how many people just want someone else to take control.

  She has called my daughter and got her permission to box up the last of her stuff in an effort to galvanize me into action. She knows I’ve been being avoiding the whole lodger thing. It fills me with horror; I’m not going to lie. But even with whatever raise my new position brings I still need the money if I’m going to help Ashle
y and Ryan stay afloat once they’ve only got his salary to rely on. I’m not complaining: TV pays well compared to most other things. But a lifetime of being a single mum takes its toll financially. Apparently the average cost of bringing up a child is over two hundred thousand pounds. It’s mind-boggling. That’s an awful lot of packets of fish fingers (the only food Ashley would eat from the age of five to nine. I used to sneakily substitute them for the vegetable versions sometimes in an effort to get some greens into her. She always knew) but it all adds up.

  Hence Roger the lodger. Or preferably Loretta the subletter.

  We open a bottle of red first. Dutch courage. I know Ashley’s not moving back home any time soon but clearing out her stuff feels so final. Which is ridiculous given that she’s never really lived in this flat, except in the holidays. Still, her room is her room, and it contains all the things we’ve been carting around from place to place since she was tiny.

  ‘This room is a goldmine,’ Dee says, chucking a pile of CDs into a box that she’s conjured up from somewhere (she actually arrived with ten, flat-packed, complete with tape and a marker pen). ‘Have you decided what you’re going to charge?’

  ‘No idea,’ I say sulkily as I put Ashley’s Famous Five books in a box. She’s hung on to all her childhood favourites and I can’t stop myself browsing through each of them.

  ‘ “Zone two. Close to the Thameslink …” ’

  ‘ “Shared kitchen, shared bathroom.” Oh God, I don’t know if I can share my bathroom. Maybe I should put “women only”?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re allowed,’ she says, emptying the contents of a drawer out on to the bed. Pens, hair scrunchies, old lip glosses spill everywhere.

  I sit down next to them. ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’

  Dee looks at me with what I always describe as her ‘explaining things to a toddler’ face. ‘How much is their rent?’

  ‘I know.’

  I bought this flat when I first started working on Churchill Road with the help of a decent deposit, courtesy of the sale of my mum’s house after she died, and a huge mortgage. It was all my mum ever wanted – for us to move out of our endless string of rented flats, always at the mercy of unscrupulous landlords and exorbitant rent hikes – if, that is, we wouldn’t move up to Milton Keynes and in with her (we wouldn’t). Ashley and I had lived in six different places in her short life. The fact my flat was a basement, and so dark you had to put all the lights on even in the summer, helped. But it’s still a stretch to make ends meet every month.

  ‘Do you think I need to decorate?’ I say, looking round at the tired paint with little patches missing where years-old Blu-tack has been ripped off, and knowing the answer.

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s enough for tonight though.’ I pile the four boxes we’ve filled so far in a corner to emphasize my point.

  ‘OK, Gran,’ she says. This is her hilarious new joke. She finds the idea that I’m about to be a grandmother in my early(ish) forties both gobsmacking (as do I) and comedy gold. In the couple of weeks since I broke the news to her she has called me Gran – or Grandma, or Nan, or Granny – approximately forty-eight thousand times. She never tires of it. I, on the other hand, am struggling to come to terms with seeing myself in a role that conjures up visions of blue-white curls and shiny ill-fitting false teeth. Most women are having babies at my age, not grandchildren. My way to deal with it is to ignore Dee, starve her of the laugh she’s craving. It’s not working, but it’s all I’ve got.

  ‘So,’ Dee says once we’ve settled down in the living room with the real-flame gas fire turned up high and our glasses topped up. Smokey stretches out luxuriously on the sofa between us. ‘How’s Juliet taking it?’

  Dee has never met any of my work colleagues but she’s heard enough stories about Juliet over the years to have a good idea what the answer will be.

  ‘With her usual good grace. I’m secretly hoping she might decide it’s too humiliating to have me as her boss and leave.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll make things difficult for you?’

  I lean back into the cushions. Do I? ‘I don’t think she’ll make things difficult but I don’t think she’ll make them easy either, if you know what I mean. I just have to be grown up about it.’

  Dee flicks her too-long fringe out of her eyes, something she does approximately every two minutes. I once timed her when we were drunk and talking about what irritated us about the other one (I’m an earring twiddler apparently. I twirl the two tiny gold hoops in my left ear round and round while I talk. I have no idea I’m even doing it. ‘Sometimes it’s fifty times. I’ve counted,’ Dee had said and I’d spent the rest of the evening alternating between trying not to touch them and shouting ‘And again!’ every time her hand strayed up to her hair). ‘What’s the worst she can do?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say.

  She raises her glass. ‘Well, I’m proud of you. Just so you know.’

  ‘I’m proud of me too,’ I say. And I am. Terrified, but proud. I just hope I’m up to it.

  4

  On Monday morning I’m the first in our department to arrive at work. I bought myself a new bag in Stables Market on Saturday – cute but not expensive – and last night before I went to bed I packed it carefully like I used to the night before the first day of the new school year.

  I spent a lot of the weekend finishing boxing up Ashley’s things, although now I have no idea where to put them all. Mine is not a flat with impressive amounts of concealed storage. Dee’s parting shot on Friday was that I probably needed to ‘freshen up the communal parts’ before I advertise the room.

  ‘The kitchen, the bathroom, the living room …’

  ‘They’re not using the living room!’ I’d almost shouted. ‘The living room’s my haven. They can put a TV in Ashley’s room.’

  ‘You’ll need to make that very clear when they come to view it,’ she said. ‘And the hall could probably do with a lick of paint.’

  I groaned. ‘Why am I doing this again?’

  ‘Because you need extra money. And the company probably won’t do you any harm either.’

  Dee is one of those people who hate being on their own. Her idea of hell – a whole day stretching before you with nothing to do except to please yourself reading a book or going for a solitary walk – is my idea of heaven. She’s always trying to get me to join things or go out with her to ‘meet new people’ because she thinks the amount of time I spend alone is unhealthy.

  I fobbed her off with a promise to meet her and Gavin for lunch at the Roebuck on Sunday.

  ‘See?’ I said as she left, cramming a woolly hat down over her dark head, which only made her fringe cover her eyes even more. ‘I have a social life. I have a lunch date in my diary.’

  ‘Me and Gav are not a social life,’ she said, hugging me.

  I make myself a coffee in the little kitchen that we share with the accounts department and the general office. The milk smells like it is achieving its goal of becoming yoghurt by Wednesday so I leave it black. And then I remember that I hate black coffee, but at this moment the caffeine seems more important than the taste. I detour via the print room to collect the mountain of Roz’s scripts and outlines that I left printing when I went home on Friday evening. My plan is to get in a good hour of quiet reading before anyone else arrives. I need to be on top of things.

  There’s a small pile of papers beside the printer but a quick scan of them shows them to be a schedule. Maybe someone moved my stack out of the way. I have a quick scout round the general office thinking either Emma or Lorraine might have decided to organize them for me. Nothing. So I check on my desk. Again nothing.

  I know three-hundred-odd pages would be hard to miss so I walk round again, check the big drawers under Lorraine’s and Emma’s desks, take another look round the print room, even looking in the recycling bin in case they’ve been mistakenly thrown in there. The cleaners have been known to do stranger things. Emp
ty.

  Frustrated, I send Emma and Lorraine a quick text – Did you pick up a load of scripts from the printer on Friday night? – and then I remember that Lorraine had left before me anyway, so it could only be Emma. They both respond within minutes. No.

  Rather than waste time I decide I can read one of the scripts on my desktop and send the others to print again. I know we’re all supposed to do it and save paper, but I hate reading scripts on my computer. I find it hard to get a sense of how long things are or the pacing. But it’s better than doing nothing.

  I pull up my emails, searching for the one from Roz. It’s not there. Or if it is it’s not making itself obvious. I enter her name into search. I have hundreds of emails from her but nothing from Friday that contains any attachments. I go back to my inbox, scroll down again. I can’t find it.

  I stomp over to her desk, turn on her computer. I can check in her sent mail. Roz and I know each other’s passwords. Have often asked the other one to check something, or print something off if we’re busy. I find it easily enough. Forward it to myself. Then I find the shortest one of the attachments and send it to print.

  I go straight to the print room to wait for it. It’s suspiciously quiet. I check the printer for lights but it’s as if it’s oversleeping from the weekend. I bend down to find the plug. The socket is switched off. Relieved, I turn it back on and hear the satisfying roar as the machine wakes up. I wait for it to chug and rumble and do whatever it is that it has to do that takes so long, but then there’s nothing. I notice a flashing message. Out of ink. I reach for the cupboard where the cartridges are kept. Locked.